About my Blog
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Dignity: The validity condition for worldviews and religions
How is it possible to assess the validity of my Christian faith? The path of my investigating enterprise led me to the claim that dignity, freedom, and personal integrity are the validity condition for any religious faith and worldview. I particularly investigated the validity of the Christian faith. For reasons of coherence, the validity condition of one faith and world view must be valid for all kinds of religious confessions and world views. Women, men, and queer enjoy and confess their faith, and all faith sentences are of equal value, there is no privileged sentence of faith. If all women, men, and queer are of equal dignity, liberty and Human Rights, there cannot be discrimination of a certain faith or religion. (Rather than the letters LGBTQI as acronym, I shall use the expression “queer” to include all non-heterosexual and gender variant people on the grounds of their non-normativity). Nevertheless, the validity of any faith sentence must be assessed. A claim to validity of a faith sentence that does not contribute to an effective rule of dignity, freedom, and Human Rights falls short of its validity.
Common Sense, discrimination, and knowledge
My instruments for assessing the affirmation of dignity as a validity condition for religious faith-claims is philosophy. In the first decades of the 20th century the philosophers of the so-called Vienna Cercle doubted that expressions like transcendence and metaphysics do make sense at all. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim concepts of a creator of the universe who is called God, were considered empty concepts with no meaning at all. The concepts of God, of transcendence, and religious faith were considered empty myths and senseless talk, because the empiric affirmation of these concepts is not possible. Believing in non-empirical concepts contradicts the method of natural sciences, which progress by affirmation or negation of the truth of a hypothesis. Empirically secured knowledge gets generated by an endless series of experiments, by proofing hypothesis after hypothesis as right or wrong, by assessing that a hypothesis is the case or is not the case.
The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) accompanied me all my life. Logic and language critique, epistemic questions of world views and the encounter of cultures clarify my thinking. I owe fundamental insights into the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein thanks to the discussions and seminaries with the mathematician and language philosopher Vladimir Richter (1925-2013), a Jesuit friend living with me in the community of the Jesuit College in Innsbruck. In 1950, Richter had fled Communist Czechoslovakia. In Austria he tried to stay in contact with the Czech Catholic underground Church and its intellectual and spiritual leader Bishop Felix Davidek (1921-1988). In 1970, Davidek validly ordained Ludmilla Jarova (1932 –) a Catholic priest. This valid ordination of a woman proofs that there are neither dogmatic obstacles, nor biblical arguments that would render impossible the priestly ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church. When Rome judged the women priests, married priests, and married bishops no more necessary for the survival of the Church, church policies changed. After the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, the Vatican demanded from the ordained women and married men to lay down their priestly functions and stay silent. Discussions with Richter always included comments on the state of development of the Czech Roman Catholic Church. During one of my conversations with Richter, I began to understand what now is called the linguistic turn. That moment turned my philosophical mind set upside down. It is common sense to understand the thoughts of our brain as something almost immaterial. We consider ideas as something very special that exists in our reason, that makes up our intellect, and belongs to immaterial soul. The perishable body guarantees our evanescence, ideas apparently possess an everlasting independent existence. It is common sense to understand thoughts as being an instant product of the human brain.
Common sense tells us that we know about the world and how it works because of capabilities of reason as the most important faculty of our brain. It is also common sense that we communicate our thoughts and feelings with language and speak our mind using language. We do not have to think about our speaking, and we naturally speak vernacular language. As a child we learned how to speak and therefore we do not have to worry any more how to use words. Our communication works, and we master our daily communicative routines without difficulty. We operate in the world without paying much attention or reflecting a lot about how we speak, although language is rather a complicated tool. We have forgotten the days when we learned from our parents how to use words and we usually do not reflect on the people-made rules of language that took centuries of collective promethean efforts to develop. Usually, we are not aware that by taking the word, we reinforce the rules of grammar and oral expression as a normative practice in our community. It is common sense that we express our thoughts, we know that we communicate with language. It is common sense that we do not need society to speak with ourselves. We insist, our intimate inner life is independent of outside influences. Our inner life is private life.
When a philosopher comes up and challenges our understanding of how the world works, we prefer to stick to our own experience that has served us well all lifelong. We do not rapidly open to alternative understandings of what is going on. Reluctantly we would accept the need to understand further and further how the world works. We have accepted that we think with our brain and reason, and we take for granted that speech and language are purely instruments for expressing ourselves and relate to others. On a first look we would reject the idea that language does not only represent our thoughts but also generates thinking. We take for granted that with the help of language we can show what we think and feel, but we do not think that there is more.
Wittgenstein took a second look at language and came to an alternative understanding of how we operate the world of thinking. He doubted the taken-for-granted status quo of the philosophies of ideas of the mind, of existential phenomena and of ontological entities. Wittgenstein opened the modern mind to understand that ideas and thoughts are pictures of language. Language produces the thought; we think and consciously feel with speech and language; the brain and body first produced the capability to speak and create language. Ideas and thoughts are the result of the use of words and sentences, there is no thinking without speaking.
Philosophy is critique of language
“A thought is a sentence with sense” Wittgenstein wrote in number 4.00 of his Tractatus and in number 4.001 he says, “The totality of sentences is language”. From these sentences follows that we must investigate language to clarify our thoughts. It is our capability of speaking that enables us to think, it is not our thinking that makes us speak. The hypothesis that speaking does not come after thinking but comes first or at least comes always and only together with speaking, needs a simple verification by personal experience because common sense would reject this hypothesis. Our common sense is not convinced that we cannot think without using language, and that many things in our brain only work with the use of language. I met very few people - inside and outside the scientific and academic community -, who opened to the idea that without language there is no thinking of ideas.
I suggest a simple practical exercise, so to say a kind of mental experiment, to get aware of the words we use when we suppose that we are merely thinking. Think of something, think of a blue sky, think of a cloudy sky, think of the trees with colored autumn leaves, think of a valley and the river, get conscious that you are happy or that you are sad or that you feel something in between, or think of a person you like or dislike, a person that you trust or distrust, and observe your consciousness when thinking; you will get aware then that anything of what you are thinking is present in your consciousness as words and sentences. Take notice of the fact that your consciousness is full of words and sentences. We are not producing immaterial thoughts when thinking, but we produce language pictures and sentences as our thoughts.
When Vladimir Richter told me in one of our evening conversations in the mid-eighties of the last century “the thought is the sentence” I turned my thinking and started to look at sentences and the use of language to clarify my thinking about the brain, about philosophy and theology, about cultures, religions, worldviews, Human Rights, and much more. The path of my philosophical investigation of language throughout three decades is summarized and systematically developed in the first chapter, first book of my Trilogy “Theologizing of a Christian; Human Rights and the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council Trilogy I–III”. English 2021. DOI 10.15203/99106-051-2. Vol. I 348 pages, volume II 444 pages, volume III 514 pages. Open Access Publication.
Content of the Posts
I grouped my post into five categories: Sense, truth, and belief; Spiritualities; God’s just world; Human Rights; and Second Vatican Council. I start my Blog editing at least one post in each category. I will continue posting articles every two weeks.
The posts in category “Sense, truth, belief” explain Wittgenstein’s understanding of sentences; his theory of all kinds of pictures of the world: pictures of empiric interest, cultural pictures like music, logical pictures, pictures of daily life, and many others. I continue my series of articles presenting Wittgenstein’s famous tables of truth that examine our language pictures according to the two valued logic of yes and no. Two valued logic operates the functions for computers and the internet. I continue describing Wittgenstein’s evolution from a two valued logic to a three valued logic that legitimately includes the truth value “I cannot know empirically”. Next there will be a post on Wittgenstein’s conception of personal ethics which he developed in discourse with the Vienna Cercle; ethical decisions are decisions of individual subjects who insist on claiming good what they have freely judged to be good. An article will then deal with religion and religious convictions and world views in Wittgenstein’s egalitarian view. I want to discuss and assess the validity of my claims to what is good and right within a language community of a multitude of speakers and discussion partners. I write on the criteria for observing the dignity of the persons who discuss convictions, values, believes and world views. First, I insist that it is necessary to identify the claims of interest of the discourse partners, then they must define the validity condition for claims to validity. Yes, society owes these elements of discourse theory to Juergen Habermas. In 1987, I participated at a seminary of Habermas and Appel at the Johann Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Habermas is a philosopher who meets the students with tolerance and respect, his teaching stays relieving coherent with his behavior. Finally, I propose to insist on the effective rule of Human Rights as validity condition for dignity, peace, and justice on earth.
The dignity of the individual woman, man, and queer person living on planet earth is constantly threatened by violence, poverty, wars, ecologic catastrophes, pandemics, and other cruelties from which humans make suffer their fellow humans on the planet. In our times these threats reached planetary dimensions and for the first-time humans acquired the capability to extinguish human life on earth by atomic warfare.
The category “Human Rights” deals with personal integrity, and that we must cope with a lot of crisis and nurture life-preserving resilience skills. Above all, we must learn to change our destructive behavior against each other, and we must stop the ruthless exploitation of the limited resources of our planet if we want to survive. With the help of industrial technologies, we changed the geology of earth, humans destroyed in the last two centuries natural resources like coal, oil and gas that took hundreds of thousands of years to process from organic material. This geophysical human impact changes our climate for the next hundred thousand of years to come.
As biological species, humans constitute but a minority form of life. Most of the biological life on the planet is microbial. Scientific facts may help to meditate the insignificantly small role of humans within the whole universe and invite to discover modesty, excitement, and curiosity about the depths of the cosmos and the infinite small dimensions of the microcosmos of cells, proteins, molecules, atoms, and of the universe’s photons of light. As there is a planetary aspect of my own life, there is also the emotional and social aspect that impacts my integrity. Since dignity is first a personal matter, I write some lines on my psychic evolution towards integrity and dignity.
Self-awareness and skills for handling my emotions are important capabilities for ensuring my integrity. Practicing meditation is also an important element of my well-being. In this context I post in the category “Spiritualities” about a form of meditation that evolved in the 16th century and got approval from the Roman Catholic Church authorities. In the 20th century, the pontifically approval of the meditation exercises of Ignatius of Loyola legitimated the practice of the spiritual experiences by the Roman Catholic faithful. Meditation is not only for the clergy and the monasteries. The faithful started to insist on the significant dignity of their spiritual experiences as fundamental elements for the life of the whole Church.
The category “God’s just world” describes basic Christian faith-concepts.
Philosophically argued and spiritually legitimized claims to dignity and Human Rights within the Roman Catholic Church strongly conflict with the monarchic government of the Roman Church. The category “Second Vatican Council” (1962-1965) is about these conflicts. I will explain the function of a Catholic Council as the most important official self-assessment of the Roman Catholic Church`s social organization, doctrine, and teachings. I will post on the events of the Council and the conflict rich development of the 16 documents of the Council by the assembled 2500 bishops and the many commissions filled with their preferred theologians. I will analyze the texts and comment where they enhance the dignity of the faithful and where the dignity of the individual faithful is sacrificed for the absolute legislative, governmental and theological primate of the pope and the bishops who obey his orders in their dioceses around the world. The third chapter of the first book of my Trilogy deals with two documents that are very important for the assessment of Human Rights in the Roman Catholic Church. The first document is called Nostra Aetate which translates “In our time” and officially ends Catholic antisemitism and somewhat restrains Catholic supremacy claims over other religions. The second document is called “Dei Verbum” which translates “Word of God”. This document speaks on the First and the Second Testament, that is on the Christian Bible. The Roman Catholic Church accepts with this document that the Bible is a book about faith and not about history or natural sciences and assesses the dignity of the biblical authors by affirming their authentic authorship of the biblical texts as persons rooted in their cultures. The biblical authors use the literary genders and forms of their time. They are not writing fiction, they write about their faith, and I call a sentence that talks about the faith of the speaker a faith sentence. The so-called word of God is communicated with the help of faith sentences. Some biblical authors talk about their biographies or about kings and their deeds. It is up to the historians to eventually identify personalities and events from the Bible with historic persons and facts. The Bible is in no way presenting biographies, it is not possible to write a biography of Jesus. From the beginning of the Council these affirmations about the Bible were debated without much of a consent. Conflicting views and interests raged throughout the Council. Much of the conflicts concerned the status of the Church institution and theological tradition in relation to the Bible. Dei Verbum got the approval vote just three weeks before the closure of the Second Vatican Council on December 8, 1965. The other Council documents I present in the second and third book of the Trilogy.
Interest of Knowledge
The Trilogy and the Blog is about Human Rights and the faithful within the Roman Catholic Church. My interest of knowledge is: Has the Roman Catholic Church to say anything meaningful to contemporary women, men, and queer and does the Church finally respect the dignity, liberty, and freedoms of the faithful? The texts of the Council show never-ending variations of two contrasting Church conceptions: a social concept of patriarchal power and the concept of an egalitarian faith community. All references to these two contradicting concepts in the documents coherently insist and teach that the absolute monarchic power of the pope and the bishops under the pope rule the Church community and demand obedience of the faithful to their teaching and instructions. The concept of the Church as a monarchic society oppresses the Church masses living and hoping for a Church constitution that protects the dignity of an egalitarian community of faithful. So far, the Roman Catholic Church rejects a social structure that would equally respect all believers, their individual faith experiences and spiritualities. During the last 60 years, millions of women, men, and queer faithful left the Roman Catholic Church because the Church failed to recognize their dignity, equal liberty, and rights. I am not sure if the Roman Catholic Church will start to transform into a community of believers in Jesus Christ and God’s just world, but I sincerely hope for this transformation.